Since Thunderbird 10.0 will be the first "ESR" release for the enterprise community I've added a short paragraph to the main post with a link to the FAQ page. There is also a short addition to the Software Update KB page mentioning that new release channel.

Please can you make this clearer. The ESR is not designed for individual users, there are trade-offs that organizations are prepared to accept, but users may not realise. Please can you consider point to the overview page instead: http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/organizations/ - it gives a better overview, and there's an easily accessible link to downloads at the bottom of the page.

Hi Mark, I've removed the direct "all-*.html" links and refer to the respective starting pages. I've also added more information on the ESR builds, though I'd still think that they are also of interest for a certain type of user (mostly those who stuck with 3.1.x for now and are looking for a less volatile - in the sense of features and UX changes - replacement).

I've updated the main post to reflect EOL of the 3.1.x branch and will remove the links for the nightly builds once those are gone from the server. That'll conclude the "Legacy branch" section, but I plan to leave it as a historical reference at least.

I noticed that recently, (I think with Daily 16.0a) there are now 64bit builds for Windows. However, Lightning 1.x is only 32bit compatible. Does anyone know if a 64bit compatible version of Lightning is being planned?

The win64 builds are still experimental as I understand it, and Firefox doesn't provide those for the release channel either. I'd assume that Thunderbird mirrors what Firefox does in this regard. As for 64-bit Lightning, that's more a question for the Calendar forum and has been an issue already for Linux and Mac OSX users since 64-bit builds were released for those platforms.

rsx11m wrote:The win64 builds are still experimental as I understand it, and Firefox doesn't provide those for the release channel either. I'd assume that Thunderbird mirrors what Firefox does in this regard. As for 64-bit Lightning, that's more a question for the Calendar forum and has been an issue already for Linux and Mac OSX users since 64-bit builds were released for those platforms.

Ah, yeah, I should have realized that lol. Since lightning win32 builds have also halted for Win & Mac, really not sure if there is even a point in pursuing it anymore.

I have removed the links to the 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 branches as there are no longer nightly builds available for the legacy versions and those folders were removed from the FTP site. Also, I've moved the legacy builds to the very bottom of the introductory post to maintain the historical context, but those are no longer relevant for any current development.

If you look at comm-release you will notice that the next release version is 17.0.2 and not 18.0; this is due to a decision to follow the 17 ESR branch until 24.0 with the releases. The 17.0.3 release should come entirely from comm-esr17/mozilla-esr17 with the 19.0 cycle once testing of that configuration is finalized (bug 815302).

Note that SeaMonkey will stick with the comm-release/mozilla-release repositories. As a consequence, MailNews Core bugs are no longer equally affecting Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. The SM 2.15 (rv:18.0) release branch comes off the default branch after merging from comm-beta, whereas the TB 17.0.2 release branch was cut off the default branch before merging and thus mirrors the 17.0 ESR state (the same happened on mozilla-release). This should be a one-time hack until the repos are cleanly separated.

So does this mean the Beta, Earlybird and Daily builds are now going to be numbered as 17.0.x (until we hit 24) or still keeping the old numbering scheme for the developmental releases (which would get rather confusing)?